In today's digital environment, protecting user information and user resources from unauthorized access is increasingly important. Accordingly, different ways of verifying that a user “is who they say they are” have been developed. Such processes and techniques are typically referred to as user authentication. Authentication is utilized in a myriad of different scenarios, and particularly for controlling access to network-based (e.g., web-based) resources.
In addition to authentication for access to user resources, controlling permissions for access to different types and/or instances of user resources is important. For instance, consider that a user has an account with a social media platform. The user's account may be associated with a variety of different types of content, such as user profile information (e.g., name, gender, date of birth, and so on), a list of the user's social media connections (e.g., friends), instances of content posted by the user (e.g., photos, videos, and so forth), contact information for the user, and so on. The user may wish to limit the type of content that may be accessed by various entities and/or individuals. For instance, a user may allow an application or other service to access the user's profile information, but may want to prevent the application from accessing other types of the user's content, such as photos. Current solutions for controlling permissions to user resources tend to be resource intensive and are prone to errors that may occur during a permissioning process.